WARNING: Beware Delphi/BDE and NetWare Long File Names
Beware of long file names on NetWare servers!
I've asked for help with a problem a couple of times recently on this
newsgroup concerning a Delphi 3.02 program with BDE 5.10. Some
existing dBase programs stored on our NetWare 5 server would only run
under Windows NT - not Windows 95/98. Finally I've discovered the
problem...
The programs and dBase files were stored in a directory on the server
which on its path had a space character (eg K:\Software\dBase\Inv
Copier\Code). The Windows 95 short name for this on a hard drive would
be C:\SOFTWARE\DBASE\INVCOP~1\CODE but on the server it was
K:\SOFTWARE\DBASE\INV_CO~1\CODE since NetWare adopts a different
convention.
This difference appears to upset Delphi/BDE. My program kept giving
weird errors when run and the problem even appeared on direct SQL
queries run through DB explorer - namely "invalid filename" or "invalid
parameter". This only occured when the program was run from the
network drive - with an equivalent directory on C: it was fine.
I've now solved my problem by dropping the space from the network
directory name. The program runs fine from the NetWare directory with
95/98 machines now (as I say NT never had the problem).
Anybody else come across this or got any extra advice on the issue? Is
this a known problem which can be fixed another way?
David Last
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